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I think so. We don’t buy our kids smartphones. We tell them that they can have one when they can buy it themselves. That tends to happen around 16-17. At home w

I think so. We don’t buy our kids smartphones. We tell them that they can have one when they can buy it themselves. That tends to happen around 16-17. At home we block social media at the router level. They have Chromebooks from school, but social media is blocked on those by the school district. We’ve never had any of the kids complain about social alienation.

yumraj 4y ago
Ditto. My old got cellphone in 9th grade, and all usual ones are blocked via pihole at home. Now in 12th, he does use Discord to communicate with a limited set of friends. But that’s it. I’ve said it before, the difference is that we don’t use any of the social media ourselves, so kids are OK. If parents use them but ask kids to refrain, obviously it’s not going to work.
- dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
  > Ditto. My old got cellphone in 9th grade, and all usual ones are blocked via pihole at home. Can’t they get around this by turning off Wi-Fi?
  - PenguinCoder 4y ago
    I put my own work around in for that. Wireguard VPN on the phone, that connects back to home. Tasker profiles to enable the Wireguard VPN connection anytime the wifi is not connect to the home network. Pihole blocking still active via that method.
  - yumraj 4y ago
    Yes, he can, and maybe he did (I can’t say with 100% certainty that that is not the case) but I believe that is where parents not using these social media comes into play. And, remember, Discord is allowed which I believe meets some of the needs. Also, any excessive data usage would show up in the family plan, which gives me confidence. I have always vocally expressed my hate for FB so maybe that helped. But all kids are different, and maybe what worked here won’t work for everyone.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Discord is social media too, though I would put it somewhere between HN and Facebook/Twitter in terms of harmfulness.
      - bart_spoon 4y ago
        I actually think Discord is even lower on the social media pole in terms of potential harm than HN. The things that seem to be the source of negative effects of social media seem to boil down to 1. dopamine-inducing like/point systems, 2. endless content feeds, and 3. the number of people interacting. HN has elements of all 3, but to a lesser degree than Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. Discord has the potential to have some of those to an extent, but especially if the user is simply using a server for them and their friends, practically none of those apply. It’s much closer to a simple group chat.
        BlueTemplar 4y ago
        Well, it's not like group chat cannot have issues of its own (toxic admins, bullying... maybe not so much among friends, though as a teenager there's quite more risk to be paired with """friends"""), but you are right, I should perhaps (?) have left my concerns with Discord being a platform (closed, privately owned, for profit motive) that is US-based at the door in this specific discussion.
    - dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
      Thanks, was just wondering. I have a 3 year old and the prospect of raising him in today's tech environment is daunting. I can't imagine I'll have to deal with him having a smartphone, etc. It's terrible.
      - yumraj 4y ago
        I have a younger kid and we have set expectations that no cell phone before high school, I’m sure there’d be push back in middle school but we’ll be able to refer to the older kid. Fingers crossed.. Also, I had used the family thing with the older kid, so app installations required patent approval. So that at least forces usage of web apps if the kid is trying to bypass some restrictions, which in itself reduces the damage caused by these social networks.
  - irrational 4y ago
    Not if it has a VPN, like circle (which is what we use), installed.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  I would probably try out Discord for yourself if you never have, you can find anything Pihole is likely blocking indirectly via Discord, just saying.
  - yumraj 4y ago
    Ah thank you. Yes, I have never used Discord and don’t know its capacities. I definitely should educate myself :) But the kid is now in senior year of high school so in worst case I did protect them for as long as I could. I won’t have much control from next year anyway..
    - giancarlostoro 4y ago
      Fair, I use it all the time, there's probably millions of different communities on it, think of reddit but with the capacity to share files, images, voice chat, video call, screenshare and so on. Now remember how insane reddit can get without all of that. Just wanted to post this in case someone else has no idea and they let their kids on that platform. Chances are high most people on Discord are fine, but bad can be found anywhere online.
- nineteen999 4y ago
  > I’ve said it before, the difference is that we don’t use any of the social media ourselves You wouldn't classify HN as social media?
  - beej71 4y ago
    I'd say it's a subclass of social media. There's dopamine social media and non-dopamine social media.
    - nineteen999 4y ago
      I want to thank you for your socket guides etc. I learnt TCP/IP programming from those way back in the 90's! Presuming I am talking to the correct Beej here of course.
      - beej71 4y ago
        You're welcome! Always good to hear when the guides are used to good effect. :)
  - yumraj 4y ago
    Touché! But, I'm pretty sure the Surgeon General did not have HN in mind while making that comment. :) HN is a social media, but it lacks certain capabilities that make it OK. First and foremost, there is no DM, then it's heavily moderated both by users as well as by DanG, and then it is text based. Also, based on my observation, the karma/like acquisition is not what drives people's comments here. So, while you're correct that it's a social media, it's not the cesspool of poison that the usual ones, that come to mind when we use the term social media, are.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - irrational 4y ago
    I wouldn’t. It’s not social without a social network. A social network implies that we are not all anonymous strangers. It implies we know people’s real names and other personal information about them. To the best of my knowledge, I have never interacted with the same person twice on HN (or Reddit). That’s basically the opposite of social or a network. When everyone is anonymous, and might even be a bot, it isn’t social media. Mostly because it is not social.
jcelerier 4y ago
they are going to be very inadapted when they end up in college or later. this is also restricting them from career opportunities, e.g. community & socials management etc. I know people who flat-out say that they wouldn't trust someone with no social media presence.
- ahoya 4y ago
  The people you’re describing are called morons. I don’t want my kids to work for morons.
  - sibeliuss 4y ago
    Amen
- irrational 4y ago
  That hasn’t been my experience. We have a 25 year old, 23 year old, and 21 year old that had absolutely no problems adapting to college. I have no social media presence and it has never affected me in the slightest.
- boredtofears 4y ago
  inadapted to what? you dont learn life skills on social media.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  > I know people who flat-out say that they wouldn't trust someone with no social media presence. I've known people who say this. Trust me: They're not worth associating with. Most/all have unhealthy social problems. And none have worthwhile positives that you'd miss out on by not being part of their circle.
TideAd 4y ago
And if they did complain, what then? Are you worried about the social lives they might be missing out on? About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  What about the social lives they might be missing out on by being obsessed with Snapchat?
  - est31 4y ago
    It depends really whether you as a kid can have a social life at all without being on social media. If your school is one of those no-digital-devices places where tech workers send their kids to, then you'll manage. But most schools aren't like that. Instead, there, children heavily rely on online services to communicate. I'm a late millenial, so I didn't have 100% the same experience as a kid growing up now has, but even for me, I felt it on my own skin. A lot of social interaction was inaccessible to me due to me not being on Facebook by choice. When some event was planned, I didn't immediately know about it. Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition, back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS. Back when said side walks existed in the first place.
    - logifail 4y ago
      > Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition Our eldest travels into the nearest town by train, on his own, to get to his school. He's done this since he was 11. Our youngest walks to her primary school, on her own, since the first week she started at primary school. > [..] back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS. Why any parent wouldn't trust their child to go for a walk unsupervised but would trust them to be on Snapchat unsupervised is completely beyond me.
      - 4y ago
sitkack 4y ago
You aren't blocking HN. Are you also blocking Reddit?
digitallyfree 4y ago
I'm curious how your kids collaborate with other students for schoolwork if social media is disallowed. When I was in elementary and high school I regularly used MSN/Facebook/etc. for group projects and study sessions, and from what I know today's students mostly use Discord. Having a student's Facebook group for the class/school was also very common and people would discuss assignments and events. Obviously the kids do fool around on those services but they also use it for legitimate purposes like how corps today use MS Teams. If a student did not have access to those services I would not want to work with them on say a group assignment because it would be very difficult to keep things organized. I would not want to go out of my way to go to their house/make phone calls to keep them in the loop.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Kids don't use facebook. There is still imessage and school email, schoology, gsuite etc. No one is doing schoolwork over the twitter or instatok that we know of.
  - digitallyfree 4y ago
    We had an official school LMS/email back in the day too, but students didn't like using that for obvious reasons. Today (at least with the kids I know) they typically use Discord for assignments and the like. It's not as bad as Twitter and co. but I would still call it a social media platform.
- irrational 4y ago
  They have school email, though, from what I have observed, they primarily collaborate through the google office suite.

yumraj 4y ago

Ditto. My old got cellphone in 9th grade, and all usual ones are blocked via pihole at home. Now in 12th, he does use Discord to communicate with a limited set of friends. But that’s it. I’ve said it before, the difference is that we don’t use any of the social media ourselves, so kids are OK. If parents use them but ask kids to refrain, obviously it’s not going to work.

dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
> Ditto. My old got cellphone in 9th grade, and all usual ones are blocked via pihole at home. Can’t they get around this by turning off Wi-Fi?
- PenguinCoder 4y ago
  I put my own work around in for that. Wireguard VPN on the phone, that connects back to home. Tasker profiles to enable the Wireguard VPN connection anytime the wifi is not connect to the home network. Pihole blocking still active via that method.
- yumraj 4y ago
  Yes, he can, and maybe he did (I can’t say with 100% certainty that that is not the case) but I believe that is where parents not using these social media comes into play. And, remember, Discord is allowed which I believe meets some of the needs. Also, any excessive data usage would show up in the family plan, which gives me confidence. I have always vocally expressed my hate for FB so maybe that helped. But all kids are different, and maybe what worked here won’t work for everyone.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Discord is social media too, though I would put it somewhere between HN and Facebook/Twitter in terms of harmfulness.
    - bart_spoon 4y ago
      I actually think Discord is even lower on the social media pole in terms of potential harm than HN. The things that seem to be the source of negative effects of social media seem to boil down to 1. dopamine-inducing like/point systems, 2. endless content feeds, and 3. the number of people interacting. HN has elements of all 3, but to a lesser degree than Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. Discord has the potential to have some of those to an extent, but especially if the user is simply using a server for them and their friends, practically none of those apply. It’s much closer to a simple group chat.
      - BlueTemplar 4y ago
        Well, it's not like group chat cannot have issues of its own (toxic admins, bullying... maybe not so much among friends, though as a teenager there's quite more risk to be paired with """friends"""), but you are right, I should perhaps (?) have left my concerns with Discord being a platform (closed, privately owned, for profit motive) that is US-based at the door in this specific discussion.
  - dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
    Thanks, was just wondering. I have a 3 year old and the prospect of raising him in today's tech environment is daunting. I can't imagine I'll have to deal with him having a smartphone, etc. It's terrible.
    - yumraj 4y ago
      I have a younger kid and we have set expectations that no cell phone before high school, I’m sure there’d be push back in middle school but we’ll be able to refer to the older kid. Fingers crossed.. Also, I had used the family thing with the older kid, so app installations required patent approval. So that at least forces usage of web apps if the kid is trying to bypass some restrictions, which in itself reduces the damage caused by these social networks.
- irrational 4y ago
  Not if it has a VPN, like circle (which is what we use), installed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
giancarlostoro 4y ago
I would probably try out Discord for yourself if you never have, you can find anything Pihole is likely blocking indirectly via Discord, just saying.
- yumraj 4y ago
  Ah thank you. Yes, I have never used Discord and don’t know its capacities. I definitely should educate myself :) But the kid is now in senior year of high school so in worst case I did protect them for as long as I could. I won’t have much control from next year anyway..
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    Fair, I use it all the time, there's probably millions of different communities on it, think of reddit but with the capacity to share files, images, voice chat, video call, screenshare and so on. Now remember how insane reddit can get without all of that. Just wanted to post this in case someone else has no idea and they let their kids on that platform. Chances are high most people on Discord are fine, but bad can be found anywhere online.
nineteen999 4y ago
> I’ve said it before, the difference is that we don’t use any of the social media ourselves You wouldn't classify HN as social media?
- beej71 4y ago
  I'd say it's a subclass of social media. There's dopamine social media and non-dopamine social media.
  - nineteen999 4y ago
    I want to thank you for your socket guides etc. I learnt TCP/IP programming from those way back in the 90's! Presuming I am talking to the correct Beej here of course.
    - beej71 4y ago
      You're welcome! Always good to hear when the guides are used to good effect. :)
- yumraj 4y ago
  Touché! But, I'm pretty sure the Surgeon General did not have HN in mind while making that comment. :) HN is a social media, but it lacks certain capabilities that make it OK. First and foremost, there is no DM, then it's heavily moderated both by users as well as by DanG, and then it is text based. Also, based on my observation, the karma/like acquisition is not what drives people's comments here. So, while you're correct that it's a social media, it's not the cesspool of poison that the usual ones, that come to mind when we use the term social media, are.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- irrational 4y ago
  I wouldn’t. It’s not social without a social network. A social network implies that we are not all anonymous strangers. It implies we know people’s real names and other personal information about them. To the best of my knowledge, I have never interacted with the same person twice on HN (or Reddit). That’s basically the opposite of social or a network. When everyone is anonymous, and might even be a bot, it isn’t social media. Mostly because it is not social.

jcelerier 4y ago

they are going to be very inadapted when they end up in college or later. this is also restricting them from career opportunities, e.g. community & socials management etc. I know people who flat-out say that they wouldn't trust someone with no social media presence.

ahoya 4y ago
The people you’re describing are called morons. I don’t want my kids to work for morons.
- sibeliuss 4y ago
  Amen
irrational 4y ago
That hasn’t been my experience. We have a 25 year old, 23 year old, and 21 year old that had absolutely no problems adapting to college. I have no social media presence and it has never affected me in the slightest.
boredtofears 4y ago
inadapted to what? you dont learn life skills on social media.
BeetleB 4y ago
> I know people who flat-out say that they wouldn't trust someone with no social media presence. I've known people who say this. Trust me: They're not worth associating with. Most/all have unhealthy social problems. And none have worthwhile positives that you'd miss out on by not being part of their circle.

TideAd 4y ago

And if they did complain, what then? Are you worried about the social lives they might be missing out on? About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.

bcrosby95 4y ago
What about the social lives they might be missing out on by being obsessed with Snapchat?
- est31 4y ago
  It depends really whether you as a kid can have a social life at all without being on social media. If your school is one of those no-digital-devices places where tech workers send their kids to, then you'll manage. But most schools aren't like that. Instead, there, children heavily rely on online services to communicate. I'm a late millenial, so I didn't have 100% the same experience as a kid growing up now has, but even for me, I felt it on my own skin. A lot of social interaction was inaccessible to me due to me not being on Facebook by choice. When some event was planned, I didn't immediately know about it. Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition, back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS. Back when said side walks existed in the first place.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition Our eldest travels into the nearest town by train, on his own, to get to his school. He's done this since he was 11. Our youngest walks to her primary school, on her own, since the first week she started at primary school. > [..] back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS. Why any parent wouldn't trust their child to go for a walk unsupervised but would trust them to be on Snapchat unsupervised is completely beyond me.
    - 4y ago

sitkack 4y ago

You aren't blocking HN. Are you also blocking Reddit?

digitallyfree 4y ago

I'm curious how your kids collaborate with other students for schoolwork if social media is disallowed. When I was in elementary and high school I regularly used MSN/Facebook/etc. for group projects and study sessions, and from what I know today's students mostly use Discord. Having a student's Facebook group for the class/school was also very common and people would discuss assignments and events. Obviously the kids do fool around on those services but they also use it for legitimate purposes like how corps today use MS Teams. If a student did not have access to those services I would not want to work with them on say a group assignment because it would be very difficult to keep things organized. I would not want to go out of my way to go to their house/make phone calls to keep them in the loop.

mixmastamyk 4y ago
Kids don't use facebook. There is still imessage and school email, schoology, gsuite etc. No one is doing schoolwork over the twitter or instatok that we know of.
- digitallyfree 4y ago
  We had an official school LMS/email back in the day too, but students didn't like using that for obvious reasons. Today (at least with the kids I know) they typically use Discord for assignments and the like. It's not as bad as Twitter and co. but I would still call it a social media platform.
irrational 4y ago
They have school email, though, from what I have observed, they primarily collaborate through the google office suite.